Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy Read Free Page B

as wet paint, as the bitten meat of cherries. But over and above that bloom she wore a radiance that had been but newly applied, and stood taut with a tensity derived from some galvanic force that still electrified the air about her, and had not been dissipated by time at all.
    She was, he saw, about to speak. But on the explanation of what had happened to her he waited with no joy at all. For so soon as he had found himself surprised he had been taken in charge by that most miserable part of him which believed that the whole world was furtively deriding one Arnold Condorex and which ascribed to derision supreme power over the universe, against which love and justice might range themselves in vain; and it whispered in his ear that what had transfigured the girl could be nothing less than this omnipotence of mocking laughter.
    Blackly he moved to take her burden from her, and was about to say, with a stiff laugh, “Well, you have caught me looking in the glass,” when she said happily: “Well, who would not, left alone in a room!” and then cried out, as if she had been hurt, “Oh, I was not laughing at you! Arnold, how could you think I was laughing at you!” She ran beside him to the table, clinging to his sleeve with both hands, and as soon as he had set down the tray pinned herself to his bosom. “What have I done that you should think I would laugh at you and think meanly of you?” she asked piteously; and looking down into her wet eyes he knew that he was a fool.
    “Why, nothing,” he said, and gravely kissed her. “It is only that I am sometimes black and bitter and that …” What he had in his heart to say was that in his journey up from sordid God-knows-where he had had to overcome so many ambushed memories that it was not surprising if his fretted vigilance saw enemies everywhere. But it was hard for him to admit even to Harriet how long and hard that journey had been; and Harriet relieved him of the need to, for she nodded her head and patted his hand as if he had already confided in her. “But tell me, dear, has anything happened to you? When you stood at the door I had the queerest notion that you were so excited about something that you were going to burst out singing, or laughing, or crying—”
    “Oh, yes, something has happened!” Harriet told him; and drew away from him, solemn and open-mouthed with wonder, very much as she had done by the window on the balcony, not so long before. “You will not believe it! But you will have to believe it!” Then she looked a little disconsolate, as if she had divined that though he might believe it he would not like it. “Let us have tea first!” she begged rather sadly; but smiled brilliantly under her lashes, as if she thought that she would lead him to it, and it was not in human nature after that first amazement he should not like it.
    Nor was it in human nature not to like the meal, to which her little wrists moving about the tea equipage gave the air of a doll’s tea-party. Of the two cups and saucers on her tray one was India red, and the other that pale blue which Victorian ladies used freely in their water-colour drawings of the Bay of Naples, and she offered him his choice between them; and bade him speak if he liked to drink his tea out of any other colour, for there were four more of the harlequin set in the china cupboard. Fondly she asked, “Will you not have another, my dear?” though there are no dairy Falstaffs who push excess to the point of the third egg; and she had opened for him a new pot of the quince jelly and the apple jelly flavoured with orange, though only the other day he had heard her lamenting that such conserves lose their flavour almost as soon as they are exposed to the air. Tenderly he reflected that her little head, which was almost egglike in its oval blandness, was as full as an egg is of meat with the desire to please. But for that his shrewdness rebuked him. There must be much else besides. She had mastered the